User blog:Weas-El/Image policy
Image overview After reviewing nearly every single image in this wiki, I think we can categorize them as follows: * Images from the books (Inheritance covers or "Guide to Alagaësia" scans) * Images from the movie (screenshots or promotion images like posters, wallpapers, etc.) * "External" images that look like Inheritance characters/creatures/etc. but aren't meant to represent them * Fan-altered images to make for example a sword look like another * Fan-created images, some of them quite professional, some of them children's drawings What do we do with them? Canon I read some old discussions about this topic and arrive at the conclusion, that there are basically two open questions: # Should we allow only canonical material or fan-art too? # Is a good fan-art, that shows so./sth. as described in the book, "more canonical" than screenshots from a freely movie adaptation? Maybe the first question, that we have to think about, is this one: What is this Wiki about? Let's take a look on our main page. I read there * "Inheritance encyclopedia", and * "Inheritance cycle database". I think this means, that our Wiki's topic are the Inheritance books only, nothing else. But this doesn't hit the mark, does it? There's a lot of information in here about other books, the film, the actors of this film, fan websites etc. Instead we could say, that the Wiki's topic are not only the Inheritance books, but all associated material as well. This is why, in my opinion, the Eragon film is definitely "canon", and so are all of it's screenshots. Why am I writing this? We have to find a solution, how to handle the plenty of images, especially fan-art, that is already in the Wiki, as well as future uploads. And we have to come to an agreement, what kind of images is allowed be used in the articles, especially in the infoboxes. It is quite weird for me to see fan-art in a character's infobox, especially it is about our main character Eragon. Or take, for example, the article about the horse Cadoc. There's an image of any horse in there. This horse is part of the film, why not take a screenshot? Because the color doesn't match the description from the book? Compromise I rearranged the images on some pages about Rider's swords yesterday (see Zar'roc or Rider's sword for example), following this system: * Every kind of image (fan-art or not) is allowed in an article. * Images from the books and the film are allowed everywhere in an article. * All other images go into a gallery at the article's bottom, with a headline like "Fan-art" or "Other images"... * There is one exception: If the film representation of so./sth. differs from the description in the books, there is ONE fan image allowed in the "upper area" of the article, next to a film screenshot, to make the differences clear. In this case the community will vote on the image's choice. What do you think about this? --Weas-El ( talk | blog ) 08:06, April 8, 2010 (UTC) Category:Blog posts